Truth, Justice, Freedom, and The American Way

It took time and required struggle to get to that precious understanding.

All Truth requires Time, because all Truth is learned in stages over time.

Truth can be blurred or advanced by emotion.

Both reason and emotion are God-given, and each should be used in their best ways, and at their proper times.

Evolutionary Understanding of God

Darwin’s theory of evolution caused some to doubt the need for a Creator that most of humanity held in some form from the earliest known histories.

Some assert that Darwin himself, as his life neared its end, became a believer. True or not, it opens many questions, such as, does reason and faith conflict with each other?

That God exists ought to be a simple matter of reasoning and observation.

Man and woman “fit” together. How could that reality have possibly evolved by mere accident?

A building reflects design, and that reflects intelligence guiding and forging that design. Did a building make itself? Clearly, not.

Similarly, how could humanity exist without a guiding hand of an all-powerful, eternal Creator that brought everything else into being?

Greek and other ancient philosophers knew thousands of years ago truths about the origin of all things – through reason – that humanity must understand and embrace again today.

The human body is so complex, how could all those complex systems have evolved together by accident so wonderfully? “I am fearfully [read awesomely],and wonderfully made,” (Psalm 139:14) said David – the Jewish priest, prophet, and king.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Which came first, the acorn or the oak tree?

All such paradoxes are easily explained in the light of a sound belief in a Creator. Science and faith ought not be separated, they ought to work together. Just as a man deprived of oxygen will result in death over time. Some things are just better united, than divided.

By analogy, an explosion in a print shop doesn’t produce an unabridged dictionary.

Rather, explosions produce destruction and chaos. Yet the ‘big bang’ didn’t create disorder. That theoretical big bang produced a universe with unseen but powerful laws which govern it, such as gravity.

The planets revolve around the sun, in an orderly, not random or chaotic fashion.

Reason and Faith, Together

Reason and faith should ennoble and enlighten each other. Faith doesn’t rely on some emotion alone. It is faith, emotion, and reason working together that helps the mature believer advance towards the fullness of Truth.

American ‘Tolerance’

There is no state imposed religion in America, but that doesn’t make America a godless nation.

America’s founders, imperfect yet motivated believers in a Creator God, felt that faith was essential for the government of the Republic.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” – Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

America is a Republic, a nation of laws.

Those laws ideally make all people equal under the law.

But that’s not to say that all beliefs are equal. Just as there are truths in math, science, professional, economic, or philosophy, so too their are truths in matters of faith.

Skimming or jumping to conclusions often lead someone to a false conclusion.

Until the time comes that more people embrace the obvious notion that there are ultimate truths – including religious truth about God – tolerance and mutual respect is prudent.

But there should be a thirst for all truth. That includes professional and religious truth.

After all, where does business ethics find its most powerful foundation, if not in eternal truths?

Jesus also recognized the sad reality of divisions. Each of those divisions find at their core some sin.

Jesus came to cast a cleansing fire upon the earth, until the divisions between people would be clarified by the clash of truth over half-truths or falsehood.

Until 500 years ago, all Christians were largely united.

As a kid riding my bike to junior high school, I stopped one day at an intersection. There were four churches, one on each side of the corner. How could that kind of division exist? I wondered, how could such disunity among believers be?

But division does exist, in all walks of life.

Varied factors caused Martin Luther to nail his 95 theses on the church at Wittenberg, which began the splintering of Christendom. Is it time to revisit the origins of those, and other divisions?